Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

[Noah_SannTek]

Hey HN, I'm Noah, co-founder of SannTek (https://www.sannteklabs.com). We're building a breathalyzer for cannabis.

I bet some of you have had the same idea cross your mind that we had: "If we have a breathalyzer for alcohol, why don't we have a breathalyzer for cannabis?" We're nanotechnology engineering alumni from the University of Waterloo. Two factors led into us deciding to pursue this idea: 1. Cannabis was being legalized across Canada and police were completely ill-prepared, so we saw an opportunity to help; 2. the science required to make this device exist was particularly interesting.

Alcohol breathalyzers are fundamentally a fuel cell where the alcohol in your breath sample is oxidized, which then produces an electrical current that the device then translates to BAC. For alcohol, this works because of Henry's Law, which says that at any given temperature the ratio between the concentration of alcohol in the blood and that in the alveolar air in the lungs is constant.

Cannabis is a very different beast. Not only is it a non-volatile, fat-soluble molecule, but the mechanism in which THC (the psychoactive component of cannabis) appears in your breath isn't super straight forward. Also, it is present in much lower concentrations in the breath compared to alcohol. Whereas a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% (the legal limit in most states) might result in a concentration of 208 ppm of ethanol in the breath, a similarly impairing dose of cannabis results in 0.00001 ppm of the drug in breath.

Detecting such a low concentration is difficult, and as a result, cannabis drug use has been detected in a variety of sub-optimal ways. The state of the art is a blood draw, followed by detection of THC at a toxicology laboratory using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. While accurate and well-validated, this approach has several problems. First of all, since THC is fat-soluble it remains in a person's body much longer than alcohol, especially if that person is a frequent user. Frequent users have been known to have detectable THC in their blood one week after beginning abstinence. These people are clearly not impaired all week but could be arrested and charged with a DUI based on many states laws across the US. Interestingly, police have the opposite problem with infrequent users. For most people, the concentration of THC in their system will decay quickly post-consumption. It takes around 2 hours (at best) for a police officer to get a blood draw from a suspect. At this point, many people will no longer have detectable THC in their system. Our device solves both these problems for police. Our breathalyzer uses an ultra-sensitive immunosensor to detect the minute concentration of THC in breath. Breath is the better medium for cannabis testing for several reasons. First of all, THC concentration in breath for both frequent users and infrequent users decays below detectable levels within 3-4 hours post-consumption and we have never detected THC in the baseline for any of our subjects. So our device does not incorrectly identify frequent users as impaired as blood testing can. Secondly, the breath tests can be administered quickly roadside, eliminating the risk of concentration decay seen with blood draws.

Our device comes with a reusable analyzer and a single-use disposable cartridge. It costs us $2 to make a cartridge, and police are willing to pay $20 per test. An individual will breathe into the mouthpiece, and our filter system will collect exhaled breath particles (specifically non-VOCs). Currently, we manually "extract" the THC off of the filter into a solvent liquid, but in the future, this will be automated using novel microfluidics. The solvent, with the captured THC, is then transferred to the surface of the sensor- which is an electrochemical immunoassay. When the THC is there, the output signal is different than when the THC is not there (happy to dive further into this in the comments if people are interested).

We haven't had enough resources to run any formal trials yet to publish data, but that is changing this year. We've hired a contract research organization, (shout out Curebase), to help us run our very first clinical trial with blood draws. We're going to be looking at the correlation between breath and blood concentrations, at various time intervals after consumption, to validate (or invalidate!) our preliminary in house data.

Selling to the police is notoriously difficult, but we're imagining a world where there are one of our devices in every police car in North America. This weekend we exhibited at the IACP DAID and the response from the attendees was great! We have over 30 police departments across North America that have expressed interest in purchasing the device and that number is increasing every day.

We're excited to hear all your questions and feedback! I encourage any questions you may have for us :)

[woah]

Sounds like it’s well-intentioned, but I’m afraid that given the incentives of all parties involved here, and the complexity of the technology, there will be a lot of false positives.

It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that.

I’m wondering if you can elaborate on what incentives your company has to produce accurate devices, against your customer’s unstated preferences. What’s keeping you in check? Are you worried about class action lawsuits from victims of false positives, if it were independently proven that your device is overly sensitive?

[SannTek]

You raise a good point. Interestingly, your comments run contrary to what a lot of law enforcement officers have said to us.

In general, the police are hyper vigilant about buying only devices that are independently validated to be very accurate. Every conversation we have had has eventually lead to "is it NHTSA approved?". The reason for this need for third party validation is that the police are incredibly court room sensitive. If there is any chance a defense attorney would be able to pull out a study showing low specificity or sensitivity for a device, the police will simply not buy it. Third party validation gives them that guarantee.

You are right that the police want more convictions (or less time consuming convictions), but the way they do that is by having very accurate devices that are defensible in court, not inaccurate devices that risk cases being thrown out. That is why making sure our device has low false positive is very important.

[mitchellst]

> It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that.

Is that obvious? If this were as overwhelming an incentive as you say, we wouldn't have accurate breathalyzers for alcohol. But we do, and it's simple to see why. 1) Cops aren't the only customers; medical establishments, individuals, and workplaces also have a legitimate interest in measuring impairment. 2) Tech like this doesn't remain novel forever, it can be checked for accuracy, and if you made a device that exaggerated impairment your reputation would tank, your company name would become a political hot potato, and your sales would never materialize. 3) There is definitely a point in disputing the idea that cops are indiscriminate gangsters roaming the streets trying to lock up any citizen they don't like the look of. Police have their personal and institutional biases, but by and large, most are interested in tools that allow them to safely and fairly administrate the rule of law. Police don't have much career or institutional incentive to arrest someone for a DUI at a traffic stop or not—they just stop bad drivers and check. It's prosecutors who are trying to rack up conviction numbers as a matter of career advancement and political viability. But even that gets checked: their work will be subject to an adversarial legal system, at which point any evidence that the device doesn't work would come out in court and tank their conviction rate.

So... where do you see perverse incentives here, again?

[chadash]

> What’s keeping you in check?

It's going to be fairly easy to test this. You take one group of people who haven't smoked in the last few hours and you test them. Make sure it doesn't go off. You take another group who have smoked (I'm sure plenty of college students would be happy to sign up for this trial) and you test them, make sure it does go off. It's pretty simple. It's a machine with an empirical number, so you don't even have to do this double blind.

And if it doesn't give good results? It won't hold up in court. Every lawyer defending someone with a positive result (whether false positive or true positive) will argue that the device isn't accurate and the case gets tossed (or even the ability to use these as evidence). If it doesn't hold up in court, police really won't have much incentive to use these anyway.

[Daniel3]

"It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that." Uh, why couldn't we talk about it as adults? OP's answer below is excellent. Police want a device that will make their job most effective and profitable, with the lowest margin not only for legal repercussions, but also the lowest possibility of people like you deciding that all police officers are pure evil who just want as many convictions as possible. Doesn't everybody want their job to be like that? BLM has made some good progress (and more is needed yet) scaring some pure evil people who happen to be police officers into wanting what's good and right. Probably not prudent to worry about a new technology that might be oversensitive, especially when the first time this thing is used in a conviction by a person with a rich dad, they'll spend as much as possible throwing doubt on the research supporting it, or how the officer was trained to use it, or etc etc etc, in order to build plausible deniability in court and get the case thrown out.

[dragonwriter]

> It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions

If a defendant ever challenges the use of the device, an inaccurate (particularly, false-positive-producing) device is more likely to be thrown out discrediting the device class, not just the individual case, and potentially forcing after-the-fact dismissal of prior convictions.

So, avoidable false-positives isn't necessarily an approach consistent with maximizing convictions.

[ruffrey]

It makes me wonder how breathalyzers work. If you fail, I assume the police still need to analyze a urine sample to prevent false positives. But probable cause is established with a breathalyzer failure.

[chadash]

I don't understand the negativity in many of the comments here. I'm all for legalization of marijuana, but I actually think that the inability to test for people driving high is a very reasonable argument against legalization. I generally feel that people should be able to make their own choices, but not if those choices involve driving a 3000 pound piece of metal down the highway while impaired.

Yes, we need to be certain that this isn't giving false positives. But if anything, this is step towards more legalization efforts on the whole (and fewer people driving high).

[cbthrowaway]

I've been a daily cannabis user for over a decade. I have a prescription for this, like millions of others with prescriptions for psychoactive medications without driving limitations. Would you send someone to prison for driving because they took their Adderall that morning? Cannabis is not like alcohol in regard to impairment of motor function and decision-making under the influence. Surely the same concentrations of particulate correlate to different levels of impairment in different individuals. Of course it is possible for individuals to be impaired by cannabis to the extent that driving would be dangerous. There are many factors. I'm wary of a device that purports to determine actions as dangerous based on the the measure of some particulate in the breath.

[SannTek]

Thank you for your feedback. It is really valuable to get the perspective of a frequent cannabis user. Cannabis tolerance is definitely a huge factor in determining whether or not someone is impaired. As a daily user, I am sure you are fine to drive after having used cannabis (although this is not legal advice :) ). However, people forget that there are significant tolerance effects for alcohol as well. There are people who can blow a 0.15% (well over the legal limit of 0.08%) and not exhibit any impairment symptoms. The key is finding a limit that allows police to identify actually impaired drivers while giving those with tolerance enough leeway to avoid being falsely charged. The scariest thing for frequent users is the blood legal limits being proposed in Canada and across the US, give that blood can have detectable levels of cannabis up to a week after abstinence. That is why one of our big focuses is finding a replacement for blood testing.

[water42]

There's nothing wrong with having a prescription for marijuana, even if the "prescription" is really just a state medical license provided by a sketchy doctor that you slip 200 USD once a year.

But please stay off the roads while you're under "psychoactive" effects (read: high) . There are LEGAL drugs that are illegal to use while operating a motor vehicle.

[gburdell3]

>Cannabis is not like alcohol in regard to impairment of motor function and decision-making under the influence.

As someone has been high a few times before, I would most definitely not agree with this

[4NDR10D]

Great job to the founders, awesome to see more cool companies out of the UW nano program.

Curious why all the negativity, perhaps people are unaware that cannabis actively DOES impair driving to dangerous levels. Also, as this startup is from Canada I'm almost certain the mindframe of the founders is to develop a device that makes legalization EASIER, not allowing police to use it catch and arrest people on the street who they think are high.

One issue we have been dealing with in Canada is how to regulate driving after consuming cannabis. A zero tolerance policy for smoking + driving within days is unreasonable and thus will be ineffective. This device and the research behind it looks like could help regulators and police catch people who are dangerously high while not arresting those who happened to smoke much earlier.

[kenforthewin]

Given that marijuana arrests disproportionally target people of color, have you considered the ethical implications of bringing your product to market? The accuracy of your device doesn't affect how or on whom it will be used.

[Noah_SannTek]

We absolutely consider ethical implications for bringing this product to market. We currently live in a world where it's a "free-for-all", and officers establish reasonable suspicion, which leads to an arrest, without any objective evidence. We hypothesize that this is part of the reason why there's a higher number of PoC arrested. This doesn't happen with alcohol, because there is an objective device.

[core-questions]

Is it that they disproportionately target PoC, or are they simply smoking and driving more often and getting caught for it? Do we really expect every single crime statistic to show a completely perfect, proportionate representation of the host population's ethnic makeup?

[cmrdporcupine]

So many naysayers here, many of which probably aren't sharing the road with cannabis consuming drivers in a region where it is 100% legal like here in Canada.

I've consumed it many times, and I know how impaired I'd be behind the wheel. It terrifies me to think of all the idiots who are probably out there driving while stoned, pretending they're "perfectly fine."

EDIT: cool, these guys are around the corner from where I'm sitting (Google Waterloo) in our old office building. Best of luck!

[cmiles74]

It's legal where I live and the drivers on the road have not changed significantly. For those opposed to legal cannabis use, it's easy to blame any traffic infraction on cannabis. I don't think we have data available that backs up that hypothesis. In areas where cannabis has been legalized for recreational use, the incidence of traffic accidents has remained the same.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24417

[01100011]

I was an all-day pothead for 16 years with hundreds of thousands of miles behind the wheel. I had zero at-fault accidents and 2 speeding tickets during that time. I find it hard to support regulating something like THC or other metabolite threshold testing because I feel like it completely ignores the overall relationship to impairment.

Driving with an anger management issue is a much more serious problem in my experience. Why don't we test for that?

[benatkin]

Clever how you use the phrase these guys to underscore your belief that what they're doing is a good thing. I, on the other hand, agree with the other commenter that "it sounds like a terrible world honestly", and I have a negative view of this startup. I would probably something formal to describe the people working there, just like I would people working at Elsevier.

[hotelsinger]

A given level of THC affects some a lot more than others. There are people who feel extremely "high" with 20 milligrams, and others who feel nothing. I do not believe you have a solution to this problem. The only thing a police officer should be permitted to do is give a field sobriety test. These devices are going to create more problems than they solve.

[roguecoder]

Field sobriety tests are far worse than something objective like this. If a cop has it in for you, you are going to fail the sobriety test regardless of how impaired you actually are.

[tj-teej]

I remember reading a story about a Grandmother who ate a strong pot brownie everyday for medical reasons and it had little noticeable effect on her.

We know there's a direct correlation between alcohol levels and driving impairment, but I've not seen evidence for this link with THC. Are there studies that have found this? (Please forgive my ignorance...)

If someone uses X amount of marijuana (what this tech can establish), do we know that this will always have effect Y on the driver?

For example I know people who are heavy marijuana smokers who can smoke a whole joint and you'd never know whereas someone right next to them will take one puff and lose their mind.

[elif]

Do you struggle with the ethics of assisting in the arrest of, in my state, 90% minorities for a crime with dubious safety grounds?

[alex_young]

Are we even sure this is a problem? There seems to be no consensus on the impact of driving on THC [0].

THC has neurocognitive impacts, but those tend to be small and long lasting. It would be strange to tell users they can't drive for 30 days or longer.

[0]https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/26/driving-whil...

[krick]

It's not a problem, it's a business opportunity. Imagine being a sole manufacturer of a device every cop will be carrying... Many successful companies are making human lives miserable anyway, this is simply one more.

[SannTek]

The science is actually pretty concrete regarding the impairing effects of THC. Because cannabis is a schedule 1 drug, it can be very difficult for researchers to get their hands on real world doses of THC. Instead, they use very low doses that are not relevant to what is actually sold at dispensaries. For a really good review of all things cannabis impairment, I would recommend looking through the following report by the Cannabis Control Commission in Massachusetts. A little long, but a lot of good information. https://mass-cannabis-control.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01...

[lainwashere]

I'm sorry, but I'll have to state my discontent with your product. Firstly, I question it's usability from the beginning. How accurate is it? Can you get something similar to a BAC with it? Also how often/likely is it that a false positive will happen? More importantly I fear that the "Cannabis Breathalyzer" will become like a polygraph, which can't tell whether your actually lying or not, but is merely used as a tool by police that's used against people. Comparing Alcohol to Cannabis also isn't right. These are vastly different chemicals with different effects on people. Over ~10000 people died in 2017 from alcohol impaired driving[0], can anything remotely similar be said of Cannabis? Don't get me wrong driving under the influence of any drug can be dangerous, and is why on most prescription bottles you'll have a "Do not operate heavy machinery" warning on it, but that doesn't stop everyone on medication from driving. Prohibiting Cannabis has caused much grief in the past that this tool, without accurate results and proper use, is likely going to cause more harm than good. If anything it will probably just help increase the incarceration rate to meet the status quo.

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[itsangaris]

Given there are countless substances that are hard/impossible to test for that could affect someone's ability to drive, the solution to this issue seems not to invent a new device for each substance but to come up with a more generalized test to measure someones level of impairment — reaction times are a good proxy.

[nlh]

Interesting idea (congrats on launching) and interesting discussion here. Reading this thread has popped up some questions in my mind and I'm curious to hear thoughts:

Why do we (aka society aka the police) test for specific substance quantities at all? Really, I think, what we care about is whether someone is able to competently perform the task of driving at a given moment.

If you are unable to perform that task, then you should be removed from the road (and, possibly, punished).

Frankly, I don't really care whether you're drunk, high, tired, distracted from texting or even if you're just a plain 'ol bad driver. The net result is the same - you're an increased risk to others on (and off) the road and your risk should be mitigated.

This gets to the root of a number of related issues - the fact that different bodies react to different levels of chemicals in different ways, etc. etc.

If you're able to function at a given moment, fine by me. If your driving is compromised for whatever reason (as demonstrated by a field sobriety test), then off the road you go.

Thoughts / corrections / slap-downs?

[SannTek]

Excellent point. The best solution to impaired driving would be a 100% accurate impairment test. The problem comes with designing and implementing such a test.

Let's start with what they have today, the standard field sobriety test. It is a pretty good test of impairment (with accuracy range between %75 to 90% depending on the study). However, there are several problems with the SFST. First of all, it requires police officers to be well trained and exercise their judgement roadside. This introduces the possibility for bias and the costs of training can sometimes be prohibitive. Secondly, the SFST cannot be administered in all conditions. A snowy day is a really bad time to be impaired, but also really difficult conditions for running a SFST.

The alternative is some kind of device that could detect the same (or different) markers of impairment as the SFST. The problem is making a device that is as accurate as the SFST, is portable, and easy to use is very difficult. If you look at attempts to date (like the Ocular DAX), these device tend to be really unwieldy and not even as accurate as the SFST. It seems like a technology that needs a little more time (maybe a decade?).

Overall though, definitely an avenue to explore.

[sergiomattei]

You can test and arrest for objective things, not subjective ones.

"Who can or can't drive" is a subjective criteria. Objective criteria is someone under the influence of x or y substance.

[itsangaris]

It is documented that white & black Americans consume roughly cannabis at roughly the rate, yet black Americans are 3.73x more likely to be arrested for it (figure from the ACLU). How is this device not going to contribute to that disparity?

[SannTek]

Thanks for the comment. Do you know if these numbers of for possession arrests or impaired driving arrests? I have been trying to look for the impaired driving arrest numbers but haven't had any luck yet.

One of the major roadblocks to legalization is fears surrounding public health risks, of which impaired driving is a component. We believe that by providing a device that makes policing cannabis impaired driving easier, we can help mitigate some of those fears. In that case, we hope the device would decrease possession arrests. As to whether or not our device would contribute to a disparity in impaired driving convictions between black and white American's, I am not 100% sure. Definitely something worth considering for us.

[ng12]

Hey what's it matter when you're making $20/pop.

[CosmicShadow]

So should no one attempt to make a device that detects this because some police are racist? I doubt American racism is at the top of minds of a Canadian startup trying to help with their nation's recent legalization of cannabis, even though they will definitely want to sell to the US market.

[michaelmrose]

If we are after impairment why don't we measure reaction time and motor skills?

Alchol breathalyzers are orders of magnitude easier are broadly recognized as unscientific garbage.

It would be remarkable if your research led to anything but another tool to ruin peoples lives.

It will likely be weaponized to attack groups the police dislike like minorities.

In short I think the world would be a better place if you stayed in bed.

[legitster]

I for one wish you the best of luck, and hope you develop an effective and accurate product. While I may have conflicting feelings about police municipalities and the justice system, the breathalyzer has overwhelmingly been a good thing, and has saved countless lives by keeping the roads safe.

Questions:

- What do you think the likelihood/timeline is that these tests will eventually be comparable in speed and accuracy to alcohol breathalyzers?

- Have you yet looked into the legal implications of a cannabis breathalyzer? Does it fall under the same rules and restrictions of a standard breathalyzer?

- How rigorously are you testing for false positives? Can you tell someone who has taken drugs but they have worn off vs someone who is currently high?

- Will you be making your data open source? Companies that sell proprietary technology to police departments can notoriously complicate legal cases when they do not disclose technical limitations or the possibilities of false positives or negatives.

- Will you be restricting your product sales only to regions where marijuana is already legal? (If it's already illegal, they have other more accurate ways of establishing possession, I presume they shouldn't need this device except for nefarious purposes).

[Noah_SannTek]

Hey! We appreciate the support, and I hope that this response will highlight the fact that we're engineers by trade, and are completely data-driven. We're not going to be selling anything, until there's the peer-reviewed research to back it up. Here's where we're at:

- Speed isn't so much of a problem. Accuracy is by-far the most important piece of this puzzle. I think it will be between 12-18 months until we see real, robust, repeatable science to discuss the accuracy of testing in breath.

- Legal implications of a cannabis breathalyzer are all based on two things: 1. use cases and 2. geographic location. Whether the device will be used for pre-arrest or post-arrest is something we're working on understanding better.

- There is a lot of work still to do on determining our false-positive rate. We're actually going to be doing an IRB approved human trial later this year, and we'll report back to you with our findings and the full report!

- Regarding open sourcing our tech- to be honest, we haven't really thought about this yet. Might be a good way improve transparency? We're definitely not opposed!

- That's also a great question. Our tech is most useful in places where it's already legal. So that's where we'll start.

Hope this helps!

[abstractbarista]

I think this is really cool.

I always wondered though, the way we correlate numbers to driving ability seems sketchy. Some people take multiple large dabs of cannabis concentrate - and they're barely feeling it. This is because they basically do this all day every day.

Someone like that would fail this test, despite their motor skills remaining near baseline.

It's clearly different for alcohol, because it directly increases "network latency" (if you will) of motor control and sensory inputs.

So ultimately I would like a push to improve roadside driving ability testing, regardless of suspected substance use. This covers sleepiness, dehydration, etc.

[aripickar]

Does this test for edibles? If a user has THC in their blood stream but not from their lungs, will this show up? Alcohol is absorbed through the stomach, passed through the bloodstream and released through the lungs. Since THC is fat soluble, I can't imagine it interacts the same way to allow for breathalyzer testing of people who have taken edibles.

[phnofive]

Per OP:

> We are actually testing edibles right now! Early results don't look so good, but that could be because we were using our crappy LC-MS for detection instead of our sensor. We'll keep everyone updated with how it goes!

I don’t understand how this gadget works, but if it’s detecting residual THC in the lungs from smoke or vapor, I can’t see how this improves over blood testing as a proxy for impairment; I can see how LEO would nonetheless like to have it as it further empowers roadside judgements.

[alexk307]

Way too many things will go wrong here, mainly that it will fall into the hands of the police.

How does this react to other forms of cannabis ingestion (edible, topical)?

Is there science behind cannabis impairing your ability to drive like alcohol or is this just a hypothesis that you are willing to make money off of?

Are you OK with your technology potentially targeting minorities and continuing the war on cannabis which was based almost entirely on racial motives in the first place?

What levels of cannabis are in your views "acceptable"?

[h4waii]

Do you mean "LED panel" in your Police-1 product page?

Can this detect THC that has been consumed by means other than smoking? Vaporizing? Edibles? Tincture?